Cover-up News Summary
September 23, 2005

Dear friends,

Below are one-paragraph excerpts of important news stories which you may have missed. Links
are provided to the original sources. If any link fails to function, click
here. By choosing to educate ourselves and to spread
the word, we can and will build
a brighter future.

Louisiana's
top hurricane experts have rejected the official explanations for the floodwall
collapses that inundated much of New Orleans, concluding that Hurricane Katrina's
storm surges were much smaller than authorities have suggested and that the
city's flood-protection system should have kept most of the city dry. With
the help of complex computer models and stark visual evidence, scientists and
engineers at Louisiana State University's Hurricane Center have concluded that
Katrina's surges did not come close to overtopping those barriers. That would
make faulty design, inadequate construction or some combination of the two the
likely cause of the breaching of the floodwalls. Ivor van Heerden, the Hurricane
Center's deputy director, said the real scandal of Katrina is the "catastrophic
structural failure" of barriers that should have handled the hurricane
with relative ease. "We are absolutely convinced that those floodwalls
were never overtopped," said van Heerden. On a tour Tuesday, researchers...showed
a "debris line" that indicates the top height of Katrina's waves was
at least four feet below the crest of Lake Pontchartrain's levees. They contended
that the pattern of destruction behind the breaches was consistent with a localized
"pressure burst," rather than widespread overtopping. Former representative
Bob Livingston, (R-La.)...noted that the earthen levees along Lake Pontchartrain
had all held, while concrete floodwalls had failed. He was especially concerned
about the 17th Street barrier, saying it "shouldn't have broken."
If Katrina did not exceed the design capacity of the New Orleans levees,
the federal government may bear ultimate responsibility for this disaster.

The dire conditions
created by Hurricane Katrina may be confined to the Gulf Coast, but on paper
the emergency is all over the country. President Bush has declared that
Katrina-related emergencies exist in 40 states and the District of Columbia.
Some, such as California, Massachusetts and North Dakota, are far removed from
Katrina's wrath. Apparently it does not take much to qualify as an emergency.

In another
gesture symbolizing the continued confusion of the federal response, the man
President Bush immediately named to succeed "Brownie," proves to have been the
same FEMA official who, two-and-a-half years ago, suggested that Americans stock
up on duct tape to protect against a biological or chemical terrorist attack.
David Paulison, then the government's Fire Administrator, joined with the then-head
of Homeland Security Tom Ridge, on February 10th, 2003, to say that duct tape
and plastic sheeting should be part of any home's "survival kit" in
preparation for a terrorist attack. That set off a run on duct tape at stores,
and widespread criticism of the administration. It might have been the first
time after 9/11 that a large number of Americans wondered if the government
really knew what it was talking about when it came to disaster preparedness.
And the man behind that politically explosive proposal, has just been named
to succeed the man who had been the face of the politically explosive response
to Hurricane Katrina.

A day before
the trial of Lynndie England, the U.S. soldier who held an Iraqi prisoner on
a leash at Abu Ghraib prison, a military judge on Tuesday barred the release
of photos which have already been published around the world. England is
pictured in some of the most notorious Abu Ghraib photographs. In one image,
she points and jeers at the genitals of a naked prisoner; in another, she poses
with the father of her baby, Charles Graner, in front of a pyramid of naked
Iraqi prisoners. Some photos have not been made public. England is the last
of a series of low-level American soldiers convicted of abuses at Abu Ghraib,
once a notorious site of torture under Saddam Hussein. Six have pleaded guilty
and two others, including Graner, have been convicted at military trial.

A Pentagon employee
was ordered to destroy documents that identified Mohamed Atta as a terrorist
two years before the 2001 attacks, a congressman said Thursday. The employee
is prepared to testify next week before the Senate Judiciary Committee and was
expected to identify the person who ordered him to destroy the large volume
of documents, said Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa. Weldon declined to identify the
employee, citing confidentiality matters. Weldon described the documents as
"2.5 terabytes" as much as one-fourth of all the printed materials
in the Library of Congress, he added.

Former members
of the Sept. 11 commission on Wednesday dismissed assertions that a Pentagon
intelligence unit identified lead hijacker Mohamed Atta as an member of al-Qaida
long before the 2001 attacks. Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa., had accused the commission
of ignoring intelligence about Atta while it investigated the attacks. The commission's
former chairman, Thomas Kean, said there was no evidence anyone in the government
knew about Atta before Sept. 11, 2001. Two military officers, Army Lt. Col.
Anthony Shaffer and Navy Capt. Scott Phillpott, claimed a classified military
intelligence unit, known as "Able Danger," identified Atta before the attacks.
Shaffer has said three other hijackers were identified, too. Kean said the recollections
of the intelligence officers cannot be verified by any document. "Bluntly, it
just didn't happen and that's the conclusion of all 10 of us," said a former
commissioner, ex-Sen. Slade Gorton, R-Wash. Weldon's spokesman, John Tomaszewski,
said no commissioners have met with anyone from Able Danger "yet they choose
to speak with some form of certainty without firsthand knowledge."

Note:
If you read the New
York Times article from Aug. 11th, commission officials clearly stated
that they were warned by a uniformed military officer 10 days before issuing
the commission's final report that the account would be incomplete without reference
Able Danger and Atta, as confirmed by the commission's own chief spokesperson.
Is this more recent article a rewriting of the facts?

The Department
of Defense forbade a military intelligence officer to testify Wednesday about
a secret military unit that the officer says identified four Sept. 11 hijackers
as terrorists more than a year before the attacks, according to the man's
attorney. In testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, attorney Mark Zaid,
who represents Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, said the Pentagon also refused to permit
testimony there by a defense contractor that he also represents. The Judiciary
Committee was hearing testimony about the work of a classified unit code named
"Able Danger." Zaid, appearing on behalf of Shaffer and contractor
John Smith [stated] that Able Danger, using data mining techniques, identified
four of the terrorists who struck on Sept. 11, 2001 - including mastermind Mohamed
Atta. "At least one chart, and possibly more, featured a photograph of
Mohamed Atta," Zaid said. Maj. Paul Swiergosz, a Defense Department spokesman,
said Wednesday that open testimony would not be appropriate. "There's
nothing more to say than that," Swiergosz said. "It's not possible
to discuss the Able Danger program because there are security concerns."
Zaid also charged that records associated with the unit were destroyed during
2000 and March 2001, and copies were destroyed in spring 2004. Former members
of the Sept. 11 commission have dismissed the "Able Danger" assertions.

American aviation
officials were warned as early as 1998 that Al Qaeda could "seek to hijack
a commercial jet and slam it into a U.S. landmark," according to previously
secret portions of a report prepared last year by the Sept. 11 commission.
The officials also realized months before the Sept. 11 attacks that two of the
three airports used in the hijackings had suffered repeated security lapses.
Federal Aviation Administration officials were also warned in 2001 in a report
prepared for the agency that airport screeners' ability to detect possible weapons
had "declined significantly" in recent years, but little was done
to remedy the problem. The White House and many members of the commission...have
been battling for more than a year over the release of the commission's report
on aviation failures. A footnote that was originally deleted from the report
showed that a quarter of the security screeners used in 2001 by Argenbright
Security for United Airlines flights at Dulles Airport had not completed required
criminal background checks. Much of the material now restored in the public
version of the commission's report centered on the warnings the F.A.A. received
about the threat of hijackings, including 52 intelligence documents in the months
before the Sept. 11 attacks that mentioned Al Qaeda or Osama bin Laden. Richard
Ben-Veniste, a former member of the Sept. 11 commission, said the release of
the material more than a year after it was completed underscored the over-classification
of federal material. "It's outrageous that it has taken the administration
a year since this monograph was submitted for it to be released," he said.

An Australian
lawyer for Scott Parkin says the American peace activist will have to wait months
to learn whether he will be made to pay more than $11,000 for his deportation.
Mr Parkin flew out of Melbourne on Thursday after his visa was cancelled
on national security grounds last weekend. Mr Parkin told said in Los Angeles
on his return that his five-day stay at the Melbourne Custody Centre would cost
him another $777. "They said if I ever decided to return to Australia I'd
have to pay them back." He was banned from entering Australia for three
years, and the visa in his passport was stamped with "Not for further travel".
Mr Parkin's removal from Australia seemed to be based only on something
he had supposedly said, although he had not been told what that was. "If
you can be kicked out of the country for saying words, where the words are not
a criminal offence ... then you have got a problem with democracy," [Parkin's
lawyer] Mr Burnside said.

Note:
In a second
article, the Herald states: Mr Parkin is a 36-year-old Texas-based
teacher and activist with the Houston
Global Awareness Collective (HGAC), which aims to end the US-led war in
Iraq. The HGAC vows to "increase the use of non-violent, direct action
and popular education as tools for social change." Since February 2003,
the HGAC has targeted US-based multinational company Halliburton, which is a
prime recipient of US government contracts in Iraq and formerly had US Vice
President Dick Cheney as its chief executive officer. Mr Parkin has described
Halliburton as a "poster child of war profiteering." On August
31, he took part in a non-violent protest outside US corporation Halliburton's
Sydney headquarters. For more, see this
article.

Goldes, 73, is
chief executive of a small company called Magnetic Power Inc., which has spent
years researching ways to, yes, generate power using magnets. Within a few months,
he says, he might just have a breakthrough to report that could revolutionize
where people get fuel. "All we know is that we're seeing more energy output
than input. Does Goldes realize what's he's saying -- that he's perhaps discovered
a clean, inexhaustible energy source? "That's exactly what it appears to
be," he answered. What Goldes believes he's done is produce power from
what physicists call zero-point energy. In simple terms, zero-point energy results
from the infinitesimal motion of molecules even when seemingly at rest. Normally,
I dismiss such pie-in-the-sky pronouncements. But Goldes isn't so easy to shrug
off. That's because he's also come up with technology called the UltraConductor.
The research was funded in part by the Department of Defense, which invested
$600,000 in the project. A handful of other companies worldwide are believed
also to be pursuing zero-point energy via magnetic systems. One of them, InterStellar
Technologies, is run by a former scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory
in Pasadena. According to Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine, the
Pentagon and at least two large aerospace companies are actively researching
zero-point energy as a means of propulsion.

The NHS is
seeking at least £100m compensation from two drug companies who it alleges
"fixed" the price of an ulcer drug in the late 1990s. The allegations
relate to the sale and supply of ranitidine between 1997 and 2000. The NHS's
Counter Fraud Service [CFS]...is currently investigating similar concerns in
regard to around 30 other drugs. As in any case where a drug comes off patent,
the NHS expected its price to fall, but this did not happen with ranitidine.
The investigation into why this failed to happen has led to the High Court action
against Generics, a subsidiary of the German pharmaceutical company Merck, and
the British arm of the Indian company Ranbaxy. The CFS estimates that the NHS
could have lost out on at least £100m, and possibly as much as £110m.
It has already said it will sue seven companies over the sale of common medicines
including warfarin and penicillin-based drugs.

Former CBS News
anchor Dan Rather said Monday that there is a climate of fear running through
newsrooms stronger than he has ever seen in his more than four-decade career.
Rather famously tangled with President Nixon and his aides during the Watergate
years while Rather was a hard-charging White House correspondent. He said
that in the intervening years, politicians "of every persuasion" had
gotten better at applying pressure on the conglomerates that own the broadcast
networks. He called it a "new journalism order." He said this
pressure – along with the "dumbed-down, tarted-up" coverage, the advent
of 24-hour cable competition and the chase for ratings and demographics – has
taken its toll on the news business. "All of this creates a bigger atmosphere
of fear in newsrooms," Rather said.

Flight 11's
transponder had stopped working. It was no longer sending a radar pulse. The
plane's altitude also became a matter of guesswork for controllers, though the
Boeing 767 was still visible on radar. Two F-15 jets were reportedly dispatched
from Otis Air Force Base. Just before or after the military planes got off the
ground, however, the controllers report they lost site of Flight 11's radar
signal over Manhattan. The controller who had handled the plane from the beginning
of the ordeal was stunned. A few minutes later, the Nashua controllers heard
reports that a plane had crashed into a building.

Note: According
to the official story, once the transponders were turned off in the four 9/11
airplanes, they could no longer be tracked. As the above article and air traffic
controllers will tell you, though the altitude is no longer reported, planes
are still visible on radar once the transponder is off. The plane that flew
into the Pentagon was known to be hijacked for over
half an hour before it struck. Military radar also can rapidly track incoming
missiles that obviously don't send out transponder signals. So how is it possible
that the military headquarters of the entire United States was hit, when radar
must have tracked this plane on it's way there?

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